The professor sighed and asked for some more beer. He liked Holly and was sorry for his loss, though he hardly knew whether to believe it or not. So many things had happened that another one or two seemed to make little difference.
“You say that people were moving about last night?” he asked.
“This ‘Pelican’ was like a mole-hill, sir, all alive with movement. I knew it boded something for today.”
“Some strange eruption to our state. Was that the gross and scope of your opinion?”
“I know nothing about eruptions, sir, but I had my opinions. And there was I in the mole-hill too, as wide awake as the rest of them, looking here and there, but always too late to see anyone.”
“Canst work i’ the earth so fast?” murmured the professor, and was cheered a little by his brace of quotations, which made him feel more at home and reminded him of Hamlet’s dilemma; who, like himself, was a man resolute by instinct but hindered by intellect. “If you’d like any more beer, sir, would you have it now? Because I’m going to follow them. I’ve got a motor-car myself. I’ve been robbed, Professor Benbow, and a man of spirit doesn’t sit still and turn his other pockets out to Tom, Dick and Harry. I’m going in pursuit of my own.”
“Let me come with you,” said the professor. “I, too, have been robbed.”
Holly stared at him. “So I heard, sir, though I didn’t like to mention it. But Miss Benbow’s all right. It’s only shady people that shady things happen to. Nobody’ll hurt her.”
“Thank you, Holly. You’re a good fellow.”
“That’s as it may be, sir. And now I’m ready if you are. I keep my motor-car in a shed at the back of Horrocks’s the baker.”
“As soon as I get a cap and a coat, Holly.”
“And a good thick stick, sir.”
Holly picked up a small suit-case, which seemed heavy; the professor got his cap, his coat, and his stick; and they left “The Pelican” together without attracting anybody’s attention.
CHAPTER XXI
There were some on that Sunday afternoon who pretended that “The Downish Pelican” looked a lonely bird; like a pelican in the wilderness, a widowed pelican, or a pelican whose children have turned up their beaks at a fish diet. It may have been idle fancy, for an inn-sign does not readily change its expression. And yet inanimate things do change. Who has not seen the Gioconda turn without reason from Lilith to arch young Eve, from Eve to middle-aged stupidity? Who has not thought Venus now heavenly serene, now marmoreally blowsy? Who has not observed that the agonized posture of Laocoön might be stimulated by a man stretched in a terrible yawn of boredom? Perhaps to a seeing eye “The Pelican” did look lonely.
Its interests were scattered here and there. North and south frail filaments stretched from it, farther and farther as time went on, to people whose interest in each other was due to “The Pelican,” the common origin of that interest. One thread went south-east to Lady Mercy and Mr. van Buren who, rapidly driven by Sir Philip Betts, were approaching London. Four threads ran north: a short one to the tail of an aged, high-seated Morris-Cowley in which Professor Benbow and Holly followed doggedly a dying scent; a longer one to the rocking charabanc which Saturday drove with Quentin to keep him company; a still longer one to the maroon-coloured Isotta-Fraschini in which Nelly Bly exultantly pursued adventure; and longest of all, a long, long thread to the swift Bentley, the fugitive Wesson, and the helpless Joan.
Lady Mercy and Mr. van Buren travelled almost in silence, for Lady Mercy was wondering whether it would be wiser to advertise the events at “The Pelican” or to conceal them, and van Buren sat like a statue under rain apparently without feeling, certainly without comment. From boyhood he had met trouble with taciturnity. When they were on the outskirts of London, Lady Mercy suddenly sat up and said, “I have decided to take the newspapers into my confidence. We have nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to gain by concealment. I shall go to the office of the Daily Day immediately after consulting with the authorities at Scotland Yard.”
Mr. van Buren made no objection. The possibility of concealing his loss had never occurred to him. To keep a crime story from the newspapers would seem to a good American more cruel than keeping its vitamins from a child.
Holly and the professor made a rather noisy journey. Ten miles out of Downish a puncture halted them, and after Holly had changed the tyre he opened his suit-case and revealed twelve bottles of beer and a packet of Abernethy biscuits. This pleased the professor greatly and made him say, “O monstrous! but one half-pennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!”
Holly was even more delighted when the allusion was explained, and after thay had drunk a bottle or two of beer he confided to the professor that he had always yearned for a literary education. Encouraged by this and enlivened by the beer and the fine fresh air, the professor began to recite certain passages from Shakespeare, to which Holly listened attentively. The Morris-Cowley, though still full of strength, had become noisy in its old age, and so the professor had to declaim in a good round voice, which indeed suited lines like:
“As full of spirit as the month of May,
And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer;
Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls.”
And when he remembered Hotspur’s description of the popinjay on the battlefield, he repeated, it as though he too were between the cannon and the drums, and brought it to its conclusion—
“and but for these vile guns
He would himself have been a soldier”—
with such stentorian scorn and laughter that a passing motor-cyclist with a girl on the pillion looked round and shook his fist at them.
Saturday and Quentin in the charabanc were very serious. The empty hull behind them swung perilously as they rounded corners and leapt with a clumsy vigour over casual irregularities. It was fast, but it needed strong hands to hold it on the road. Their minds were too occupied to be embarrassed by the curiosity they aroused in occasional motorists and the few pedestrians in Little Needham. Where the road branched north and west they saw an A.A. man and stopped to ask if a Bentley and a dark red Isotta-Fraschini had passed recently.
“The Bentley went by a quarter of an hour ago. The driver failed to return my salute. The Isotta followed a few minutes later, driven by a lady with no hat on. They went north,” he said.
He looked curiously at the empty charabanc and said, “You’re Mr. Keith of ‘The Pelican’ at Downish, aren’t you, sir? I suppose you’re having a bit of fun?”
“A hell of a lot of fun,” said Saturday, and drove on.
“I don’t pretend to understand what all this is about,” he said, “but one thing certain is that Joan has gone off with Wesson, and it must have been against her will that she went. Lady Porlet muddled her story as much as she could, but that’s clear. Anyway, Joan wouldn’t have gone with that damned fishy-looking book-collector unless she had been forced to. Why he forced her, or how, I can’t imagine. Another fact is that I’ve lost my poem. The only copy of it I had. I burnt the manuscript because it was in such a mess. The red-haired girl—Nelly Bly, I suppose; she’s the only maid with red hair—was primarily excited about the portfolio, which was very decent of her. It seems clear that Wesson has stolen it. He’s a book collector. And yet no one but a mad book-collector would do a thing like that. Do you think his first editions had driven him mad?”
Quentin was far more puzzled than Saturday, for the adventure had burst on Saturday out of a clear sky, whereas to Quentin it had come out of an atmosphere already charged with mysterious clouds. Saturday was perplexed and angry and anxious; Joan had been abducted, his poem stolen, and there was, so far as he could see, neither rhyme nor reason in either abduction or theft. But Quentin was mystified and astounded and simmering with excitement; it seemed to him that Nelly Bly’s conspiracy had come to irrational life and that the origin of this commotion was undoubtedly Russian. The Cheka had stretched a long finger and pressed a button, and now its
puppets were dancing. Poems and Joan were nothing but episodic, adventitious complications; incidental additions to the principal theme which—surely it was obvious—could only be a continuation of the sequence that started in the fog at Irkutsk. Wesson was, evidently a spy, a Tsarist, an emissary of the Zik, an agent of the Komintern, or a private enemy of the egregious Boris; and Nelly was on his trail.
“Look here, Saturday,” he said, “there’s far more in this than you imagine. Possibly Wesson is mad, but I’m sure he isn’t a book-collector. I think he’s a Russian Royalist.”
“I don’t see the joke,” replied Saturday.
“It isn’t a joke. Things have been going on in ‘The Pelican’ for the last few days of which you know nothing.”
“What kind of things?”
Quentin was between the deep sea of the present situation and the devil of a promise to Nelly Bly. He struggled for awhile, and then turned his back on Satan.
“A conspiracy,” he said.
Saturday drove some distance in silence.
“Do you mean,” he said at last, “that you know something about Wesson? That you expected this to happen, and never thought of warning me or of warning Joan?”
“My God, no! I never dreamt that Joan would be involved. I didn’t even know that Wesson was in it. Nelly is the “only one I knew about. Nelly Bly.”
“And what do you know about her?”
“Her husband is a Cossack.”
Saturday shied like a nervous horse, almost went into the ditch, and decided to stop the charabanc and hold a post-mortem on Quentin’s mind.
“Are you drunk,” he asked rudely, “or as mad as I imagine Wesson to be? Or are you trying to be amusing? I’ve already told you that I don’t see the point in imbecile remarks about Russian Royalists, and the same objection holds for Cossack husbands.”
Quentin lost his temper. “Don’t be more beef-witted than God made you,” he said. “Do you think, because you’ve never seen one, that there’s no such thing as a Cossack husband? There are plenty of Cossacks, aren’t there? Well, how the hell do you think they came into existence if their mothers had no husbands?”
“My dear Quentin, I’m not interested in family life on the steppes. All I want to know is what the devil Russia has to do with Joan and Wesson and my poem?”
“And aren’t I trying to tell you? I say that Nelly Bly’s husband is a Cossack. I suppose you didn’t even know that she had a husband. Well, I do know. He’s in prison in Novoro—, Novoro—something or other, and she’s working for the Cheka—or it may be the Zik—to help him. Though she’s pretty tired of the game, I think, and never wants to see old Boris again if the truth were told!”
Saturday re-started the charabanc a little wearily. “How did you discover all this?” he asked.
“She told me. And there’s no sense in your being supercilious about it. I promised her that I wouldn’t tell anyone, and I’ve broken my promise because you’re in a hole—or because Joan’s in a hole, and that’s your concern as much as anyone’s.”
“It’s good of you, Quentin, and I’m sorry for being rude. But still I don’t understand how Nelly Bly’s Cossack husband accounts for Wesson having kidnapped Joan.”
“There was a conspiracy,” said Quentin, “and wherever there’s a conspiracy all sorts of innocent people get caught up in it. It’s well known that innocent people always suffer more than the guilty ones, and Joan’s innocent enough isn’t she?”
“But what about Wesson?”
“Wesson came over from America with van Buren. Therefore he was probably connected with him, or interested in him in some way; either honestly or dishonestly. And Nelly was after van Buren’s oil secret!”
“What?”
“I knew you wouldn’t understand. But my God, if you had only heard that poor girl’s experiences you would realize the magnificent fight she’s putting up to save a creeper like Boris—Boris is her husband. He’s in prison because he quarrelled with the Cheka; or it may have been the Zik. I don’t remember.”
“What the devil is a Zik?”
“I’ve forgotten. But it’s Russian, and if you offend one there’s hell to pay. And van Buren’s secret, I gather, was the price put on Boris’s head.”
“I can’t readily forgive a girl in my employment who has been trying to rob one of my visitors.”
“Don’t you see that there are circumstances here which upset all ordinary standards? Nelly is a Russian, by marriage at any rate; living in a foreign country; fighting all alone for an unselfish cause.”
“And yet judged by any normal code she is a thief in intention if not in fact.”
“When a bourgeois code comes between life and death it’s going to get squeezed out of shape,” said Quentin.
“She seems to have handled her case well. She’s a pretty girl, isn’t she?”
“Pretty? She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”
“And her husband is in a Russian prison.”
Saturday mused for awhile on the discovery of this alien focus in his apparently peaceful household. He felt like a man who has slept all afternoon in a hammock and wakes up to find a wasps’ nest hanging from the bough above him; or like a barnyard fowl that has hatched out a young flamingo; or a boy who pulls the trigger of an unloaded gun, and sees his baby brother change suddenly as the shot goes off.
“I thought there was something unusual about her as soon as I saw her,” he said.
“I should damned well think so,” said Quentin. “A blind man could tell that she wasn’t an ordinary maid. She was educated in a convent, she says.”
“She didn’t tell you that her father was a clergyman, did she?”
“No, but he might very well have been. That would account for her idealism.”
Saturday thought it only fair to talk about Joan a little, and they reached Doncaster before either of them remembered that Wesson’s connection with the Cheka-Nelly Bly-van Buren chain had not been properly established. They discussed that, the cognate question of why he had stolen the poem, and the reason for Joan’s abduction till they came to York. Saturday guessed the last one correctly.
“I suppose he wanted the car, and as Joan was in it and he couldn’t get rid of her without advertising his intention, he took both. But how far is he going to take her? Where is he going himself?”
“Scotland, Lady Porlet said.”
“Why? And what part of Scotland? Gretna Green or John o’Groats? Glasgow or Kirriemuir?”
They stopped in York and bought a large quantity of petrol, for the charabanc appeared to burn its own weight in an hour. It drew wondering glances where-ever it went, for an empty charabanc is more unnatural than an empty perambulator. Its desolation is so vast, and somehow a little ludicrous, like an orphaned behemoth.
They enquired at several filling-stations for a passing Bentley, but no one had seen it. And once while the gleaming “Blue Bird” stood beside a glittering golden pump, a policeman came up, curious, and asked, “Is that your charabanc?”
“No, thank God,” said Saturday. And the answer apparently satisfied the Official conscience.
They were leaving York by a road lined with pleasant houses when Quentin, who was driving, suddenly stopped and said, “I’ve got an idea. Wait here for a minute.”
He got down, opened a gate, and knocked at the door of a house called “Mangaldai.”
Saturday, from a commanding position in the “Blue Bird,” saw a maid open the door and try almost immediately to shut it again; observed Quentin deftly prevent her; watched her listen and finally disappear; perceived a red-faced man with a white moustache come and also listen to Quentin; beheld Quentin turn and point to the charabanc, at which both of them laughed; and then they went into the house and the door was shut.
Presently Quentin reappeared, evidently pleased with himself, and as he got into the charabanc he told Saturday that their proper destination was Glasgow.
“I suppose,” he said, “th
at once again you’re puzzled by my superior knowledge. Well, when you posed the ridiculous alternative of Glasgow or Kirriemuir some time ago, my brain began to work. It invariably responds to stimuli. And talking of stimuli the old boy in that house gave me a three-finger peg of very good whisky. He’s a retired planter from Assam, and he got quite friendly when I told him that you were on leave from a tea-garden in Ceylon, and at present too tight to meet strangers. I like people who have lived in the East—”
“Did he tell you to go to Glasgow?” interrupted Saturday.
“Not a bit of it. That’s my own discovery. I remembered two things, two obvious things, which are always the hardest kind to remember. One was that Wesson is an American. The other, that not-infrequent ships leave Glasgow to go to America. Wesson is a fugitive. Wesson is going to Scotland. The only place in Scotland from which he can sail to America is Glasgow. Therefore he is going to Glasgow.”
“I should think that Southampton or Liverpool would be likelier places for him to choose.”
“That is what the ordinary man would assume.” said Quentin, and dexterously kept the centrifugal tail of the charabanc on the road as he went round a corner too fast for comfort. “But I’m not easily led away by facile inference. What do you think I went to that house for? Why, to ask them if they took The Times. And if they did, could I please see yesterday’s copy if it wasn’t already destroyed; for The Times (you probably don’t know this either) is a magnificent thing for lighting fires in the morning. Well, I got it, and while my ex-planter host was squirting in the soda—damn it, they know the meaning of hospitality in the East!—I looked up the shipping lists. And what do I find, says you? R.M.S. Turbania, says I, sailing from Glasgow at two o’clock to-morrow afternoon. Nothing bound for America out of Southampton or Liverpool, though the Corybantic is leaving Liverpool for a fourteen-day cruise to Madeira and the Atlantic Islands, if you think Wesson is going on holiday. But personally I put my money on the Turbania.”
Poet's Pub Page 19